Who Gets to Speak and Who Gets Seen: Global Media and Information Literacy Week

Understanding who produces information, who controls it, and whose voices are left out defines how democracies function and how people make informed decisions.

In Canada, nearly 6 in 10 people worry about misinformation online, and almost 50% say it has gotten harder to tell what is real from what is fabricated. When misinformation spreads, marginalized communities face most harm. False narratives about Indigenous rights, immigration, and racial justice spread faster than verified information, fueling discrimination and hostility toward the communities they misrepresent. According to a 2023 survey by The Dais, racialized people, 2SLGBTQ+ people, and persons with disabilities experience hate online at roughly twice the national average. These realities show why media literacy matters: it exposes who controls information, reveals the harms of misinformation, and ensures marginalized communities are seen and heard.

Who Gets to Speak and Who Gets Seen

Who controls the media influences what the media says. In Canada, about 77% of journalists identify as white, only 3.5% as Indigenous, and 19.5% as visible minorities. The gap widens dramatically at the top of the hierarchy where 7 in 10 newsrooms have no Indigenous or visible-minority persons in their top three leadership roles, which means the people making final decisions about what stories get told and how they get framed come from a narrow circle of similar perspectives.

This concentration of power means editors and producers are choosing topics and deciding which angles deserve attention, which sources count as credible, and which communities warrant ongoing coverage rather than occasional acknowledgment. Racialized women make up only about 2.8% of guest appearances and 4.1% of unique expert sources on-air while men still make up about 70% of quoted experts and news subjects, reinforcing whose knowledge society treats as legitimate and important.

Additionally, from a research on three major daily newspapers, stories about First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities rarely appeared except during protests or confrontations. The result is that Indigenous peoples become associated in the public mind with conflict and disruption instead of everyday life, innovation, and contribution to Canadian society. The limited visibility in mainstream media also extends behind the scenes where Indigenous creators hold just 7% of key roles in Canadian audiovisual programs, which results in many Indigenous and racialized viewers rarely seeing themselves reflected on screen.

This absence influences how people see themselves, whether they feel they belong in shared public spaces, and what society accepts as normal or valuable, with real social and personal consequences. Over 50% of racialized Canadians report experiencing unfair treatment in the last five years, and when their stories are missing from the media, they are effectively excluded from the national conversation about who counts as Canadian and whose experiences deserve recognition and care.

The Barriers to Access and Participation

Representation matters, but so does access to media. Only about 1 in 4 Indigenous communities have reliable high-speed internet, while urban households enjoy near-universal coverage. On First Nations reserves, fewer than 50% of households met the federal target speeds of 50/10 Mbps in 2021. Young people in these communities report much lower confidence in their digital skills compared to their urban counterparts, and many have to rely solely on cellphones to complete schoolwork or access government services. People living in low-income households, remote regions, or whose first language is neither English nor French face similar barriers.

These gaps determine who can access education, health care, and employment opportunities. They determine who can stay connected to their culture and language. They also determine who can participate in online conversations, who can share their perspective on issues that affect their lives, and who can push back effectively against misinformation targeting their communities.

But even for those who do have access to digital spaces, the challenge extends beyond simply being online. What matters just as much is what the platforms decide to show you. Social media algorithms prioritize content that drives engagement, which most often means sensational, emotionally charged, or polarizing material. This dynamic amplifies misinformation while burying nuanced voices, particularly those from Indigenous, racialized, or otherwise marginalized communities whose perspectives might challenge dominant narratives. The feed you see is never neutral as content gets curated based on what platforms calculate will keep you scrolling.

Communities that are underrepresented or shut out of online spaces become easier targets for misinformation because they lack the visibility and platform to correct false narratives about them. At the same time, the broader public gets a skewed picture of reality when entire groups of people cannot contribute their knowledge and experience to shared conversations. People who experience harassment online or who lack adequate access are understandably less likely to speak out or share their stories publicly. The result is a media environment where lies spread more easily and marginalized voices go unheard, creating a feedback loop that sustains existing inequalities.

How Power Uses Silence and Language

Patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy maintain power by controlling information, deciding what is visible, questioned, or accepted as normal. They operate less through obvious propaganda and more through everyday patterns of silence.

Capitalism benefits directly from misinformation that hides exploitation and makes unstable work seem normal or temporary. Migrant workers in agriculture, construction, caregiving, and other essential sectors often lack full labour rights and protections. Non-permanent residents face low-income rates of about 42.9%, more than three times the rate of non-immigrants. Because these workers reasonably fear deportation or losing their insecure livelihoods, they remain far less likely to report abuse, wage theft, or dangerous working conditions. Meanwhile, media stories regularly frame labour issues around shortages instead of examining the low wages and deliberately precarious rights that create them. By keeping these workers invisible, mainstream media allows the systems that rely on their vulnerability to thrive without scrutiny.

In Canada, the right to defend ancestral land and water sources gets criminalized through language long before any case reaches a courtroom. Indigenous land defense frequently gets labeled as ‘‘protest’’ or ‘‘blockade’’ in news coverage, while environmental actions led by settlers receive the more dignified term of “movements”. A 2022 WACC Global study found that more than 70% of headlines about Wet’suwet’en resistance used words like “protest” or “standoff”, rarely if ever acknowledging underlying questions of land sovereignty or treaty rights. Language shapes public opinion, determines who receives sympathy, and influences how the state feels justified in responding with force. In 2021 alone, over 75 Wet’suwet’en land defenders, many of them women, were arrested during militarized police operations.

Environmental racism in Canada rarely receives ongoing news coverage, and when it does, media often misrepresent the pollution, unsafe water, and deliberate policy failures that drive land defense movements. In Sarnia, the Aamjiwnaang First Nation lives immediately beside nearly 50% of Canada’s petrochemical industry, and community members report alarmingly high rates of asthma and reproductive health issues. Across Nova Scotia, African Nova Scotian and Mi’kmaw communities have historically been located near toxic waste sites through planning decisions that treated Black and Indigenous neighbourhoods as appropriate sacrifice zones. More than 25 First Nations communities still live under long-term drinking water advisories, some experiencing infection rates 26 times higher than the national average. Yet these ongoing crises rarely lead national coverage unless dramatic conflict erupts. This pattern of selective storytelling functions as misinformation in itself. It hides inequality behind neutral language and occasional bursts of outrage that quickly fade, shifting public focus away from the environmental harm and policy failures toward the resistance itself, which then becomes the problem that needs managing.

The Erasure of History

White supremacy thrives in narratives that deny or deliberately soften the history of colonial violence, making past brutalities seem less severe or irrelevant today. The rise in residential school denialism and the active spread of revisionist histories online show how misinformation can successfully rewrite collective trauma into matters of debate. By reducing documented systemic racism to controversy, media narratives help maintain the comfortable illusion that serious inequalities are historical rather than ongoing.

Nearly 50% of Canadians who went through the school system say they never learned about residential schools at all, and more than 6 in 10 now say they need more evidence before believing that unmarked graves exist near former residential school sites. This widespread doubt represents the product of decades of revisionist storytelling that deliberately softened, strategically reframed, or completely ignored colonial violence.

Many Canadians also continue to believe that slavery never existed on Canadian soil, despite clear historical records confirming that between 1628 and 1834, over 4,000 enslaved African and Indigenous people were held in colonial territories that became Canada. A survey by Ipsos found that 49% of Canadians believe racism is not a serious issue in this country, and fewer than half say schools teach enough about Black history. When history gets erased from education curricula and media narratives, misinformation fills the void.

Canada’s main national story continues to present colonization as a process of peaceful coexistence of the past, rather than the past and ongoing violent displacement it actually involves. This foundational myth remains in textbooks, news coverage, and political language that usually describe settler colonization using the sanitized words like ‘‘nation-building”. Yet Indigenous communities across Canada were dispossessed through calculated starvation policies, forced relocations, and the deliberate breaking of treaties. A 2021 survey by Angus Reid found that over half of Canadians learned very little or nothing about colonization processes or treaty rights during their education, and many could not name a single treaty.

When these histories remain untold or distorted in mainstream narratives, misinformation thrives. The same erasure that hides colonial violence from textbooks appears in media coverage of current issues affecting Indigenous communities. Coverage of gender-based violence continues to misrepresent cases, particularly those involving Indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit people. Reports tend to individualize cases or sensationalize tragedy instead of naming the systemic causes like persistent racism and ongoing colonial neglect. The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded that dehumanizing language and deep cultural bias in media reporting actively sustains harmful stereotypes and twists public understanding. 

The Scale and Consequences of Misinformation

Misinformation in Canada is widespread, influencing what people believe about society, government, and each other. Over 70% of Canadians report having encountered false or misleading information online, with major spikes occurring around elections, public health emergencies, and issues involving Indigenous rights. Misinformation often spreads fastest when it targets marginalized groups precisely because it triggers strong emotions and confirms existing prejudices. False claims about immigration levels, Indigenous land rights, or racial justice movements regularly outperform carefully verified reports in both reach and engagement on social media platforms designed to reward emotional intensity over accuracy.

The problem worsens when media outlets and political institutions provide conflicting information. Despite the accelerating climate crisis, over 40% of Canadians believe fossil fuel expansion can align with achieving net-zero emissions targets. This confusion continues because industry narratives are repeated without challenge in mainstream media. Meanwhile, Indigenous-led land defense movements that protect ecosystems and watersheds are often portrayed as obstructionist instead of communities fighting for collective survival.

Falsehoods about immigrants and refugees circulate widely. A 2024 survey by Canadian Museum for Human Rights found that, More than half of Canadians believe newcomers receive more generous government benefits than citizens do, despite abundant evidence demonstrating the opposite. Sensational headlines about border crises or illegal crossings reinforce stereotypes and actively feed xenophobia, creating a public conversation shaped far more by fear than by verifiable fact.

When people encounter conflicting claims about the same issue, whether climate change, reconciliation efforts, or refugee policy, it breeds profound distrust. Reports have found that only 42% of Canadians trust news media most of the time, and only 33% of Canadians reported high confidence in Canadian media overall, placing media trust far below confidence in other institutions like police or courts. Among Black Canadians specifically, only about 21% reported high confidence in media institutions.

Communities already excluded from mainstream narratives face a double burden. They must deal with widespread misinformation circulating about them while their own stories are dismissed or ignored. Media coverage often overlooks or misframes the lived experiences of marginalized people, steadily eroding trust. At the same time, they are exposed to harmful content, including hate speech, deliberate misreporting, and erasure from national narratives. Continuous exposure to misinformation and crisis-driven coverage takes a serious toll on mental and emotional wellbeing, especially for those already navigating marginalization in other areas of their lives.

Moving Forward: Media Literacy as Collective Practice

Global Media and Information Literacy Week reminds us that understanding media is not just about individual skill but about collective power. Media literacy must move beyond checking facts or spotting fake news. It should expose how silence, framing, and access determine who gets to shape public reality. True media literacy asks people to recognize silence as a form of power, to see how omission sustains inequality, and to use information not just to understand the world but to transform it.

Collective media literacy means building the capacity of communities to tell their own stories, challenge bias, and create platforms that reflect lived experience. It means supporting Black, Indigenous, racialized, and marginalized-led media; amplifying journalists and educators who reimagine how truth gets produced; and holding institutions accountable for what they choose to ignore.

Taking action can begin by: 

• asking who is missing from the stories you consume, whose voices remain untrusted, and what truths stay unnamed, 
• supporting local and community newsrooms, 
• sharing verified information that centers marginalized voices, 
• questioning language that disguises harm, and 
• encouraging schools, libraries, and policymakers to treat media and information literacy not as a skill but as civic infrastructure.

Misinformation thrives in silence. Media literacy thrives in solidarity. 

Building an informed society begins with choosing to listen where silence was once enforced, to see where erasure once stood, and to believe that every community deserves the power to speak for itself.

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